by David Brin
"Yes, converts. People who suddenly become blood donors—get this—very soon after they've recovered from surgery themselves!"
"Maybe they're paying off part of their hospital bills that way?"
"Mmm, not really. We have nationalized health, remember? And even for private patients, that might account for the first few donations only."
"Gratitude, then?" An alien emotion to me, but I understood it, in principle.
"Perhaps. Some few people might have their consciousnesses raised after a close brush with death, and decide to become better citizens. After all, half an hour at a blood bank, a few times a year, is a small inconvenience in exchange for . . ."
Sanctimonious twit. Of course he was a donor. Les went on and on about civic duty and such until the waitress arrived with our pizza and two fresh bitters. That shut him up for a moment. But when she left, he leaned forward, eyes shining.
"But no, Forry. It wasn't bill-paying, or even gratitude. Not for some of them, at least. More had happened to these people than having their consciousnesses raised. They were converts, Forry. They began joining Gallon Clubs, and more! It seems almost as if, in each case, a personality change had taken place."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that a significant fraction of those who have had major surgery during the last five years seem to have changed their entire set of social attitudes! Beyond becoming blood donors, they've increased their contributions to charity, joined parent-teacher organizations and Boy Scout troops, become active in Greenpeace and Save The Children . . ."
"The point, Les. What's your point?"
"My point?" He shook his head. "Frankly, some of these people were behaving like addicts . . . like converted addicts to altruism. That's when it occurred to me, Forry, that what we might have here was a new vector."
He said it as simply as that. Naturally I looked at him, blankly.
"A vector!" he whispered, urgently. "Forget about typhus, or smallpox, or flu. They're rank amateurs! Wallies who give the show away with all their sneezing and flaking and shitting. To be sure, AIDS uses blood and sex, but it's so damned savage, it forced us to become aware of it, to develop tests, to begin the long, slow process of isolating it. But ALAS—"
"Alas?"
"A-L-A-S." He grinned. "It's what I've named the new virus I've isolated, Forry. It stands for 'Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome.' How do you like it?"
"Hate it. Are you trying to tell me that there's a virus that affects the human mind? And in such a complicated way?" I was incredulous and, at the same time, scared spitless. I've always had this superstitious feeling about viruses and vectors. Les really had me spooked now.
"No, of course not," he laughed. "But consider a simpler possibility. What if some virus one day stumbled on a way to make people enjoy giving blood?"
I guess I only blinked then, unable to give him any other reaction.
"Think, Forry! Think about that old man I spoke of earlier. He told me that every two months or so, just before he'd be allowed to donate again, he tends to feel 'all thick inside.' The discomfort only goes away after the next donation!"
I blinked again. "And you're saying that each time he gives blood, he's actually serving his parasite, providing it a vector into new hosts . . ."
"The new hosts being those who survive surgery because the hospital gave them fresh blood, all because our old man was so generous, yes! They're infected! Only this is a subtle virus, not a greedy bastard, like AIDS, or even the flu. It keeps a low profile. Who knows, maybe it's even reached a level of commensalism with its hosts—attacking invading organisms for them, or . . ."
He saw the look on my face and waved his hands. "All right, far-fetched, I know. But think about it! Because there are no disease symptoms, nobody has ever looked for this virus, until now."
He's isolated it, I realized, suddenly. And, knowing instantly what this thing could mean, career-wise, I was already scheming, wondering how to get my name onto his paper, when he published this. So absorbed was I that, for a few moments, I lost track of his words.
". . . And so now we get to the interesting part. You see, what's a normal, selfish Tory-voter going to think when he finds himself suddenly wanting to go down to the blood bank as often as they'll let him?"
"Um," I shook my head. "That he's been bewitched? Hypnotized?"
"Nonsense!" Les snorted. "That's not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn't readily available, we invent one, preferably one that helps us think better of ourselves. Ego is powerful stuff, my friend."
Hey, I thought. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
"Altruism," I said aloud. "They find themselves rushing regularly to the blood bank. So they rationalize that it's because they're good people . . . They become proud of it. Brag about it . . ."
"You've got it," Les said. "And because they're proud, even sanctimonious, about their newfound generosity, they tend to extend it, to bring it into other parts of their lives!"
I whispered in hushed awe. "An altruism virus! Jesus, Les, when we announce this . . ."
I stopped when I saw his sudden frown and instantly thought it was because I'd used that word "we." I should have known better, of course. For Les was always more than willing to share the credit. No, his reservation was far more serious than that.
"Not yet, Forry. We can't publish this yet."
I shook my head. "Why not! This is big, Les! It proves much of what you've been saying all along, about symbiosis and all that. There could even be a Nobel in it!"
I'd been gauche, and spoken aloud of The Ultimate. But he did not even seem to notice. Damn. If only Les had been like most biologists, driven more than anything else by the lure of Stockholm. But no. You see, Les was a natural. A natural altruist.
It was his fault, you see. Him and his damn virtue, they drove me to first contemplate what I next decided to do.
"Don't you see, Forry? If we publish, they'll develop an antibody test for the ALAS virus. Donors carrying it will be barred from the blood banks, just like those carrying AIDS and syphilis and hepatitis. And that would be incredibly cruel torture to those poor addicts and carriers."
"Screw the carriers!" I almost shouted. Several pizza patrons glanced my way. With a desperate effort I brought my voice down. "Look, Les, the carriers will be classified as diseased, won't they? So they'll go under doctor's care. And if all it takes to make them feel better is to bleed them regularly, well, then we'll give them pet leeches!"
Les smiled. "Clever. But that's not the only, or even my main reason, Forry. No, I'm not going to publish, yet, and that is final. I just can't allow anybody to stop this disease. It's got to spread, to become an epidemic. A pandemic."
I stared, and upon seeing that look in his eyes, I knew that Les was more than an altruist. He had caught that specially insidious of all human ailments, the Messiah Complex. Les wanted to save the world.
"Don't you see?" he said urgently, with the fervor of a proselyte. "Selfishness and greed are destroying the planet, Forry! But nature always finds a way, and this time symbiosis may be giving us our last chance, a final opportunity to become better people, to learn to cooperate before it's too late!
"The things we're most proud of, our prefrontal lobes, those bits of gray matter above the eyes which make us so much smarter than beasts—what good have they done us, Forry? Not a hell of a lot. We aren't going to think our way out of the crises of the twentieth century. Or, at least, thought alone won't do it. We need something else, as well.
"And Forry, I'm convinced that 'something else' is ALAS. We've got to keep this secret, at least until it's so well established in the population that there's no turning back!"
I swallowed. "How long? How long do you want to wait? Until it starts affecting voting patterns? Until after the next election?"
He shrugged. "Oh, at least that long. Five years. Possibly sev
en. You see, the virus tends to only get into people who've recently had surgery, and they're generally older. Fortunately, they also are often influential. Just the sort who now vote Tory . . ."
He went on. And on. I listened with half an ear, but already I had come to that fateful realization. A seven-year wait for a goddamn coauthorship would make this discovery next to useless to my career, to my ambitions.
Of course I could blow the secret on Les, now that I knew of it. But that would only embitter him, and he'd easily take all the credit for the discovery anyway. People tend to remember innovators, not whistle-blowers.
We paid our bill and walked toward Charing Cross Station, where we could catch the tube to Paddington, and from there to Oxford. Along the way we ducked out of a sudden downpour at a streetside ice cream vendor. While we waited, I bought us both cones. I remember quite clearly that he had strawberry. I had a raspberry ice.
While Les absentmindedly talked on about his research plans, a small pink smudge colored the corner of his mouth. I pretended to listen, but already my mind had turned to other things, nascent plans and earnest scenarios for committing murder.
2.
It would be the perfect crime, of course.
Those movie detectives are always going on about "motive, means, and opportunity." Well, motive I had in plenty, but it was a one so far-fetched, so obscure, that it would surely never occur to anybody.
Means? Hell, I worked in a business rife with means. There were poisons and pathogens galore. We're a very careful profession, but, well, accidents do happen . . . The same holds for opportunity.
There was a rub, of course. Such was Boy Genius's reputation that, even if I did succeed in knobbling him, I didn't dare come out immediately with my own announcement. Damn him, everyone would just assume it was his work anyway, or his "leadership" here at the lab, at least, that led to the discovery of ALAS. And besides, too much fame for me right after his demise might lead someone to suspect a motive.
So, I realized. Les was going to get his delay, after all. Maybe not seven years, but three or four perhaps, during which I'd move back to the States, start a separate line of work, then subtly guide my own research to cover methodically all the bases Les had so recently flown over in flashes of inspiration. I wasn't happy about the delay, but at the end of that time, it would look entirely like my own work. No coauthorship for Forry on this one, nossir!
The beauty of it was that nobody would ever think of connecting me with the tragic death of my colleague and friend, years before. After all, did not his demise set me back in my career, temporarily? "Ah, if only poor Les had lived to see your success!" my competitors would say, suppressing jealous bile as they watched me pack for Stockholm.
Of course none of this appeared on my face or in my words. We both had our normal work to do. But almost every day I also put in long extra hours helping Les in "our" secret project. In its own way it was an exhilarating time, and Les was lavish in his praise of the slow, dull, but methodical way I fleshed out some of his ideas.
I made my arrangements slowly, knowing Les was in no hurry. Together we gathered data. We isolated, and even crystallized the virus, got X-Ray diffractions, did epidemiological studies, all in strictest secrecy.
"Amazing!" Les would cry out, as he uncovered the way the ALAS virus forced its hosts to feel their need to "give." He'd wax eloquent, effusive over elegant mechanisms which he ascribed to random selection but which I could not help superstitiously attributing to some incredibly insidious form of intelligence. The more subtle and effective we found its techniques to be, the more admiring Les became, and the more I found myself loathing those little packets of RNA and protein.
The fact that the virus seemed so harmless—Les thought even commensal—only made me hate it more. It made me glad of what I had planned. Glad that I was going to stymie Les in his scheme to give ALAS free reign.
I was going to save humanity from this would-be puppet master. True, I'd delay my warning to suit my own purposes, but the warning would come, nonetheless, and sooner than my unsuspecting compatriot planned.
Little did Les know that he was doing background for work I'd take credit for. Every flash of insight, his every "Eureka!" was stored away in my private notebook, beside my own columns of boring data. Meanwhile, I sorted through all the means at my disposal.
Finally, I selected for my agent a particularly virulent strain of dengue Fever.
3.
There's an old saying we have in Texas. "A chicken is just an egg's way of makin' more eggs."
To a biologist, familiar with all those latinized-graecificated words, this saying has a much more "posh" version. Humans are "zygotes," made up of diploid cells containing forty-six paired chromosomes . . . except for our haploid sex cells, or "gametes." Males' gametes are sperm and females' are eggs, each containing only twenty-three chromosomes.
So biologists say that "a zygote is only a gamete's way of making more gametes."
Clever, eh? But it does point out just how hard it is, in nature, to pin down a Primal Cause . . . some center to the puzzle, against which everything else can be calibrated. I mean, which does come first, the chicken or the egg?
"Man is the measure of all things," goes another wise old saying. Oh yeah? Tell that to a modern feminist. A guy I once knew who used to read science fiction told me about this story he'd seen, in which it turned out that the whole and entire purpose of humanity, brains and all, was to be the organism that built starships so that houseflies could migrate out and colonize the galaxy.
But that idea's nothing compared with what Les Adgeson believed. He spoke of the human animal as if he were describing a veritable United Nations. From the E. coli in our guts, to tiny commensal mites that clean our eyelashes for us, to the mitochondria that energize our cells, all the way to the contents of our very DNA . . . Les saw it all as a great big hive of compromise, negotiation, symbiosis. Most of the contents of our chromosomes came from past invaders, he contended.
Symbiosis? The picture he created in my mind was one of minuscule puppeteers, all yanking and jerking at us with their protein strings, making us marionettes dance to their own tunes, to their own nasty, selfish little agendas.
And you, you were the worst! Like most cynics, I had always maintained a secret faith in human nature. Yes, most people are pigs. I've always known that. And while I may be a user, at least I'm honest enough to admit it. But deep down, we users count on the sappy generosity, the mysterious, puzzling altruism of those others, the kind, inexplicably decent folk . . . those we superficially sneer at in contempt, but secretly hold in awe.
Then you came along, damn you. You make people behave that way. There is no mystery left, after you get finished. No corner remaining impenetrable to cynicism. Damn, how I came to hate you!
As I came to hate Leslie Adgeson. I made my plans, schemed my brilliant campaign against both of you. In those last days of innocence I felt oh, so savagely determined. So deliciously decisive and in control of my own destiny.
In the end it was anticlimactic. I didn't have time to finish my preparations, to arrange that little trap, that sharp bit of glass dipped in just the right mixture of deadly microorganisms. For CAPUC arrived then, just before I could exercise my option as a murderer.
CAPUC changed everything.
Catastrophic Autoimmune PUlmonary Collapse . . . acronym for the horror that made AIDS look like a minor irritant. And in the beginning it appeared unstoppable. It's vectors were completely unknown, and the causative agent defied isolation for so long.
This time it was no easily identifiable group that came down with the new plague, though it concentrated upon the industrialized world. Schoolchildren in some areas seemed particularly vulnerable. In other places it was secretaries and postal workers.
Naturally, all the major epidemiology labs got involved. Les predicted the pathogen would turn out to be something akin to the prions which cause shingles in sheep, and certain plant diseases . . . a
pseudo-lifeform even simpler than a virus and even harder to track down. It was a heretical, minority view, until the CDC in Atlanta decided out of desperation to try his theories out, and found the very dormant viroids Les predicted—mixed in with the glue used to seal paper milk cartons, envelopes, postage stamps.
Les was a hero, of course. Most of us in the labs were. After all, we'd been the first line of defense. Our own casualty rate had been ghastly.
For a while there, funerals and other public gatherings were discouraged. But an exception was made for Les. The procession behind his cortege was a mile long. I was asked to deliver the eulogy. And when they pleaded with me to take over at the lab, I agreed.
So naturally I tended to forget all about ALAS. The war against CAPUC took everything society had. And while I may be selfish, even a rat can tell when it makes more sense to join in the fight to save a sinking ship . . . especially when there's no other port in sight.
